Nothing is more exciting than finding out that you're having a baby. The moment I found out I was expecting, I began making grand plans. I read the books, spoke to pregnant friends and questioned all the new mommies I knew. Then I made some big decisions.

My daughter, the animal lover, has a father who isn't. A hamster is the biggest pet I've gotten talked into so far. It lives in her room, and basically I wouldn't even know
it was there except for one thing -- it's nocturnal.

Zot chukat haTorah begins this week's parsha, telling us that the subject of the Red Heifer is the chok of the Torah. A chok is a law that is simply incomprehensible. It makes no sense to us whatsoever.

When I tell you that a person who had become ritually defiled by close contact...

It was great seeing so many of you at the Israel Independence Day Festival on May 7 (we hope you enjoyed the fans). Be sure to check out our yeLAdim page on June 30, as we will be printing many of the essays you wrote for our 20th anniversary!

Here it is: 5,000 years after Moses wandered the Sinai, his people have finally found a home in Reseda, no less, at the Jewish Home for the Aging, the largest continuing residential care facility for the elderly in the Western United States. Yet while these Jews are no longer...

No matter where you are in the menopause transition, it's never too late (or early) to get your health act together to ensure the next 40 or so years are as terrific as or better than the first were. Here are 10 things you can do right now.

Jewish kids all get A's. It's a fact. They're all well above average. Jewish kids always star in the show, play first violin in the orchestra, win the debate championship. This week the last of the college acceptance letters went out. They all got into Stanford, Berkeley and Brown....

Their bagels sliced, toasted and slathered with cream cheese, the parents and students of the fourth- and fifth-grade classes at Santa Monica's Sha'arei Am turn toward Rabbi Jeff Marx as he welcomes them to Family Education Day.

Following is an excerpt from remarks Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered last year as part of a benefit dinner for March of the Living at the Beverly Hilton. Organizers at the event presented the governor with an award for his support.

If you've always wanted a different view of Pesach, this is the movie to watch. The animated Nickelodeon series is about a group of babies who get involved in all sorts of mischief. In "A Rugrats Passover," Grandpa Boris, babies Tommy and...

When I was in seventh grade, my English teacher made me diagram sentences, not unlike most seventh-graders in America's public schools. Truth be told, I would have rather pulled knitting needles through my cheeks than learn the rudiments of English grammar, but Mrs. McGee insisted...

I was recently at a dinner party in a New York apartment with a group of friends, all of them black except for a single white visitor. Toward the end of the evening, the conversation turned to how to improve black social, financial and educational progress. One black man, a lawyer,...

Teacher Hannah Pollin greeted the group assembled in a large circle around her. Her nine high school students, armed with a page of interview questions and tape recorders, sat interspersed among 13 senior citizens at the Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda. They formed...

Under a classroom's fluorescent lights, students and teachers scramble to find seats. An important "Parliament session" is under way as together, they hammer out a plan for allocating the school's activities budget.

The scene is the Hadera Democratic School in Israel, where students...

Singing in synagogue is something I wish I were better at doing or at least less embarrassed about doing full-throated. At the Synagogue for the Performing Arts, the congregation doesn't have that problem. They have...

For 75-year-old Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock, it was the need to re-landscape that steered the synagogue in an ecological direction. The status quo was 8,000 square feet of unwatered, weed-ridden and rarely mowed grass, along with three palm trees, two citrus...

It's a sunny winter day and a friend and I fear for our lives as my husband, Ron Magid, screeches our oversized Chrysler east down Sunset Boulevard. We're speeding toward the ArcLight Cinemas and a press screening of Peter Jackson's "King Kong."

The Simon Wiesenthal Center hosted more than two-dozen representatives from local Iranian Muslim news outlets this month to provide them with information about the Holocaust that they can, in turn, use to educate their readers, listeners and viewers.

When attorney David Karp reminisces about his time in the Cub and Boy Scouts, the good memories come flooding back. He remembers taking long nature hikes, making close friends and fashioning a pinewood derby car from a block of wood, four nails and four wheels. The Scouts,...

Descending eastward from the rolling hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem, the sapphire-colored Dead Sea appears like a jewel set in the dusty brown Judean Desert. As you breathe in the thundering stillness, it's easy to imagine why the ancient Essenes chose this place for their...

I'm smiling a lot these days because I've recently fallen in love. Starting over at 56 years young, it's unlikely that I'll experience a golden anniversary, but I'd really, truly like to enjoy and adore one special person for the rest of my hopefully long, healthy life.

In the essay "The World as I See It," Albert Einstein wrote: "A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other people, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give the same measure as I have received and am...

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